The Bank

/ Issue 12.2 /

Before our livelihoods went down the drain,
Everyone said it’s all good and that,
At the end of the day, there is no end of the day.
Risk reigned. We were good to go.
So, going forward, how appalled we were
To see things going backward, downward badly
Every day, what we worked for dumped
As damaged goods for the greater good of all.
Ruin whispered in the very word
No one cared to look too closely at:
Subprime, bad, a bad end
Just waiting to occur. And when it came,
Pulling down a venerable house of cards,
Mostly jokers, we paid for what we were.

John Foy

John Foy

John Foy’s third book of poems, No One Leaves the World Unhurt, won the 2020 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was published in 2021 by Autumn House Press. His second book, Night Vision, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and was published by St. Augustine’s Press in 2016. It was also a finalist for the 2018 Poets’ Prize. His poems have been included in the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, The Raintown Review Anthology, and Rabbit Ears, an anthology of poems about TV, and they have appeared widely in journals and online. He lives and works in New York.
John Foy

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Author: John Foy

John Foy’s third book of poems, No One Leaves the World Unhurt, won the 2020 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was published in 2021 by Autumn House Press. His second book, Night Vision, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and was published by St. Augustine’s Press in 2016. It was also a finalist for the 2018 Poets’ Prize. His poems have been included in the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, The Raintown Review Anthology, and Rabbit Ears, an anthology of poems about TV, and they have appeared widely in journals and online. He lives and works in New York.